Foreign-Owned Banks in the United States: Earning Market Share or Buying It?

Foreign-owned U.S. banks have been chronically unprofitable for more than a decade. The authors employ a profit efficiency model introduced by Allen N. Berger, Diana Hancock, and David B. Humphrey (1993), modified to be less sensitive to variations in asset size, to estimate the relative profit efficiency of 62 foreign-owned and 240 U.S.-owned banks between 1985 and 1990. Their results indicate that foreign-owned banks were significantly less profit efficient than were U.S.-owned banks primarily due to foreign banks reliance on expensive purchased funds. For foreign-owned banks, the results are consistent with a strategy of sacrificing profits in exchange for fast growth and increased market share during the 1980s. Copyright 1996 by Ohio State University Press.